Inkjet printers eject liquid ink droplets onto a recording medium, such as paper, from a printhead that moves relative to the recording medium and/or vice-versa. A printhead generally comprises one or more thermal ejection chips, each including a semiconductor substrate upon which one or more heater elements, such as electrical resistors, are disposed for transferring thermal energy into liquid ink. The liquid ink is heated such that a rapid volumetric change occurs in the ink resulting from a liquid to vapor transition and, consequently, the ink is forcibly ejected from the printhead as an ink droplet onto a recording medium.
In typical ejection chip designs, one of the first variables to be fixed is the vertical resolution of drop placement, i.e., the vertical spacing between drops of ink ejected from an ejection chip. From this starting point other properties such as the heater addressing matrix, input data register length, and chip clock speeds, to name a few, can be defined. Using this method, ejection chips with similar properties except for vertical resolution often have dissimilar electrical interfaces which require specific components for operation, for example, a unique ASIC, driver card and/or carrier for each design, to name a few. While this may provide a cost effective bill of materials for a specific design, such savings can be offset by increased development resources and time to market. Therefore, this design approach is best suited for high volume designs with long product life cycles.